Free Dead Harvest by Chris F. Holm Page A

to run me down, and the attention my little field trip had garnered from the demon realm. The way I figured it, she'd had a bad enough week already.
      Through it all, Anders sat listening quietly. When I finished, he spoke. "I know you," he said to Kate. "You're the girl on the TVs. Ten of you in every storefront. They say you killed your family."
      "Sam here thinks I was framed."
      Anders' gaze settled on the knife still jutting from the hardwood floor.
      "Yeah," Kate said, following his gaze. "I'm really sorry about that. It's just that Sam had been gone so long, I was worried he'd been caught or something, and then things got really creepy here–"
      "Creepy?" I interrupted. "Creepy how?"
      "I don't know – just creepy. I mean, there was all kinds of commotion next door earlier, and I swore I heard a scratching in the walls. Then that damn dog started barking for no reason…"
      Scratching in the walls. I leapt to my feet and hobbled to the wall that abutted the apartment next door, gritting my teeth against the pain. "Which wall – this one?" I asked.
      "Yeah, how'd you know?"
      "The others are either exterior or they face the hall." I scanned along the wall until I found what I was looking for. A heating vent, nestled in the far corner between wall and ceiling. My stomach dropped as I caught a flicker of motion like a snake receding into its hole, only this snake glinted like glass, like metal. Like the kind of camera a SWAT team would use to monitor a room.
      "That dog wasn't barking for no reason," I said. "It's time to go."
      But I was too late. As I hobbled toward the couch, the lights cut out, and the apartment was plunged into darkness. Anders found his feet and wandered over to the window, pulling aside the curtains and peeking out.
      "It doesn't look like an outage," he said. "The rest of the block is fine."
      "Anders," I said, "get away from the window."
      "What? Why?"
      " Get away from the window now! "
      Anders must've heard something in my tone that rattled him; he leapt back from the window as if stung. In that moment, the window imploded, spraying glass and wooden splinters through the darkened apartment. Something clattered to the floor, and the room began to fill with thick noxious smoke, ghostly white by the reflected glow of the street lights. The hall outside the apartment echoed with a chorus of shouts. The floor resounded with the force of approaching footfalls, coming toward us from down the hall and up the stairs.
      I realize now that someone must've tipped 'em to our presence – our faces had been plastered all over the news, after all, and with me in scrubs, carrying Kate's robed form down the street, we weren't exactly subtle getting here. No doubt some busybody neighbor spotted us and called it in. Cops were probably camped out all damn day, keeping an eye on Kate and waiting for her accomplice to return so they could spring their trap and snatch her back.
      Like I said, now I get it. Then , though, all I knew was they were coming. They were coming, and I couldn't let them take her.
      My leg erupted in pain as I sprinted across the darkened room. I paid it no mind. The gas was thicker here – it burned my eyes and clawed at my throat and sinuses like a rabid animal. All I wanted was to curl up on the floor and wait for the pain to go away. Of course, that didn't seem like much of a plan. So instead, I grabbed Anders and Kate by the arm and dragged them through the darkness toward the bedroom, slamming the door behind us.
      The air in the bedroom was a little better. My eyes and throat still burned, but I felt a little more human – a little more in control. I pulled them close, shouting over the din of the raid. "Listen very closely. They're coming in, and if I don't do something to stop them, they're going to take us all. I can't let that happen. I'm going to need to create a diversion. You two stay in here and count to fifty.